62 replies to this topic

[Diablobo]

I don't think there's any reason to think that the higher tiers are that much better than the lower ones. In the few short weeks I have been back, I can still advance even if I totally screw up and do little damage and a crappy match score. My team wins more often than not. So either way, if you play enough games you can advance while still doing stupid things. It basically just turns into a grind for the less skilled.

[DerHuhnTeufel]

The game has a very steep learning curve to begin with, just in terms of combat. When you get to outfitting mechs, buying things with the incredibly grindy system, learning about ghost heat, etc., you probably don't have a huge amount of old players. It's probably just new players trying it because it's free.

[DarkFhoenix]

Who said you had to be a genius pilot with a skilled up meta mech in quick play ?

[Yondu Udonta]

Veterans leaving for greener pastures and introduction of sensor tree that enhances lurm and atm boats such that players are inclined to just lock on and fire away.

[Gradnuko]

Dogstar, on 28 February 2018 - 12:38 AM, said:

Play the Piranha more, it's very good at getting zero damage matches.

Since when? I'm more scared of that thing than some assaults. Know what sound a piranha makes? Medium laser destroyed, medium laser destroyed, SRM destroyed, heatsink destroyed, heatsink destroyed, ammo explosion detected, left torso destroyed, [death music].

Edited by Plaid Ninja, 28 February 2018 - 03:02 AM.

[Vellron2005]

Spheroid, on 27 February 2018 - 05:23 PM, said:

Every single "old" game I have ever picked up and still has an active player base is populated with hardcore enthusiasts who play continuously for years. They are generaly skilled and know what they are doing.

However it is my opinion the player skill displayed in QP has steadily and noticeable worsened over time. In this regard it seems very different from most of its competitors.

You can see it on display every single match in the positioning, the reaction time between seeing a target and shooting or the ability to predict the future positon of a target. These are behaviors for which there are no objective stats but instrinsically you know play a huge role whether a game will be a stomp or not.

You can account for differences in ping, team weight or mech composition and not arrive at a predictive model without the obvious conclusion that your teammates simply sucked.

What is the explaination for this suckage? This game was marketed to veterans of MechWarrior 2-4. The population of those gamers is a fixed and finite number. Nobody should be coming to MWO in 2018. It doesn't have an advertising budget and PC Gamer hasn't done an expose in years. I deliberately warn people I know NOT to play this game because I don't want the reputation of the IP damaged. Who should be blamed for continuing influx of potatoes?

Why are the potatoes coming in 2018 and not 2012? Was it the lack of regional servers? Was the case of Celerons being inadequate to run Crytek in that time period? Why now and not previously? Good and bad players could have evolved together had they started the race at the same time and the gameplay would have been better for it.

Dear OP, if you think the quality of skill and / or matches has changed from closed beta to now, regardless of Tier / Elo or whatever.. you are sorely mistaken..

This game is exactly the same as it was in closed beta.. we just have more mechs and a few more maps now.. but the skill level is exactly the same..

Some matches are stomps, some are close calls, and the gameplay is more-less the same as it was then..

[Sjorpha]

I don't believe the average skill in MWO has declined, so IMO this question has a flawed premise.

One explanation for having that impression is getting better yourself, others seem worse by comparison. Another is that humans have a natural tendency to glorify the past and remember things wrong, almost everyone remembers the past as better than it actually was. A third possible explanation is that as population declines there is a wider range of skill levels in each match due to matchmaking valves opening more frequently, and as you're not used to play alongside bad players you'll notice them more than the good ones when they get seeded into your matches.

[Bud Crue]

Population of this game has always come in categories, with some overlap between those categories certainly, but clearly observable categories nonetheless:

Nostalgic Loreholes for whom this game was the only tie to their TT days of old.
Nostalgic Gamers for whom this game was the only tie to their old MW games of old.
Modern Gamers who could care less about nostalgia and actually came to the game to play it on its own merits.

Now then, when a game doesn't substantively change from its minimally viable state for roughly 5 years, and in fact gets worse in many ways as it tries to accommodate an artifice of "balance" both in terms of game play mechanics and relative player skill; which of these populations is going to decline? The one focused on game play and skill or the ones based on nostalgia?

There is your answer.

No need to get into all those who left in the early days of broken promises, etc. No, we are talking about the roughly 30k-20K folks playing for the last several years and the folks who have left as part of the games slow decline. Those later people leaving at this point, are more often than not are going to be folks who are sick of the game itself as opposed o what it represents. Don't worry though, the nostalgia folks will leave soon enough too, when they get their other options with HBS's Battletech and even MW5.

What's funniest to me is that all of Russ's changes that he tried to convince us would drive this game into some amazeballs e-sports phenomena, has in fact driven the very folks who might be interested in an e-sports experience from the game...and just in time for Solaris! I'd laugh if it weren't so pathetic.

[Bombast]

Dogstar, on 28 February 2018 - 12:38 AM, said:

Play the Piranha more, it's very good at getting zero damage matches.

Pay money? Get that notion outta my face.

[El Bandito]

Us Founders are starting to get afflicted with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and all kinds of old person disease.

[Verilligo]

You rushed head-first and alone into the entire enemy team's firing line, moving UP a hill on Oasis with no cover for anyone to approach by... and you're complaining about everyone else's positioning, Spheroid? I mean the team wasn't the best and it was certainly not a good showing by myself, either, but pushing way ahead of the team in a Victor into a chokepoint was not a shining moment of brilliance. Perhaps if you had communicated what you wanted to do or suggested an alternative to how things were playing out in the early phase of the game, it might have been less of a stomp from your perspective?

And to answer your question, the game does still get new players. Not all of us had computers capable of running MWO decently back in the day, even though they were capable of running MW4. It's gotten a lot cheaper over the years to have a reasonably powerful system and eventually people remember the old games they used to play and start looking for more modern alternatives.

[jss78]

- Influx of new players, old players moving on (unlikely?)

- Old/good players playing some other game mode (also unlikely)

- The observer has got better himself and/or remembers those old games as better than they really were? (I think it's mainly this.)

- The player base is getting slower due to old age (true for me...)

Edited by jss78, 28 February 2018 - 06:39 AM.

[PocketYoda]

Game keeps changing., players getting older and slower, players sick and tired of trying.. I know i am..


I think its mostly customers no longer take PGI or MWO seriously anymore, i mean look at the game.. Other than mechpacks whats to strive for in this?

Edited by Samial, 28 February 2018 - 07:20 AM.

[Yondu Udonta]

Dogstar, on 28 February 2018 - 12:38 AM, said:

Play the Piranha more, it's very good at getting zero damage matches.

I will get you a zero damage match when you come up against my Piranha.

[Marquis De Lafayette]

Spheroid, on 27 February 2018 - 05:23 PM, said:

Every single "old" game I have ever picked up and still has an active player base is populated with hardcore enthusiasts who play continuously for years. They are generaly skilled and know what they are doing.

However it is my opinion the player skill displayed in QP has steadily and noticeable worsened over time. In this regard it seems very different from most of its competitors.

You can see it on display every single match in the positioning, the reaction time between seeing a target and shooting or the ability to predict the future positon of a target. These are behaviors for which there are no objective stats but instrinsically you know play a huge role whether a game will be a stomp or not.

You can account for differences in ping, team weight or mech composition and not arrive at a predictive model without the obvious conclusion that your teammates simply sucked.

What is the explaination for this suckage? This game was marketed to veterans of MechWarrior 2-4. The population of those gamers is a fixed and finite number. Nobody should be coming to MWO in 2018. It doesn't have an advertising budget and PC Gamer hasn't done an expose in years. I deliberately warn people I know NOT to play this game because I don't want the reputation of the IP damaged. Who should be blamed for continuing influx of potatoes?

Why are the potatoes coming in 2018 and not 2012? Was it the lack of regional servers? Was the case of Celerons being inadequate to run Crytek in that time period? Why now and not previously? Good and bad players could have evolved together had they started the race at the same time and the gameplay would have been better for it.

Simple theory: The potatoes arrived in 2012.....the better players moved up quickly in tier and thus faced less potatoes for a while.. 6 years later those 2012 potatoes are finally tier 1...it took several years, but they finally made it due to the upward bias of the tier system.

[nehebkau]

Spheroid, on 27 February 2018 - 05:23 PM, said:

Every single "old" game I have ever picked up and still has an active player base is populated with hardcore enthusiasts who play continuously for years. They are generaly skilled and know what they are doing.

However it is my opinion the player skill displayed in QP has steadily and noticeable worsened over time. In this regard it seems very different from most of its competitors.

This is pretty easy to answer without being a condescending jerk:

Players have no reason to even try to increase their skill.

To Explain:
The experience of MWO, doesn't drastically change in the public queue between being a skilled or non skilled player. Given that matchmaker *tries* too keep big skill disparity from happening a T5 player can have roughly the same experience as a T1 player... but wait there is more!

In games where you see players progress in skills there is a in-game benefit to progressing your skills. More skilled players get special equipment, better or more engaging tasks/quests or get more challenging and more rewarding environments. So, as a player you have an in-game driver to make you improve your equipment, avatar and skills so that you can experience these more rewarding environments.

Now you can see where PGI has failed. There is no environment in the game where experience provides an increased benefit or game reward. PGI has been developing for the lowest common denominator in this game and you end up with no real reason for people to improve.

If PGI did things like, more cash rewards for higher Tier players, mechs that can only be unlocked for play at certain player levels and some type of enriching and rewarding advanced-skill only environment you would see a push in game to improve ones skills. Compare MWO to a MMO, where character progression and, as such, player skill progression is built into the game. As players in a traditional MMO build up their character's skills they also passively acquire some personal skills in regards to being more effective with that character/avatar as the player is forced to face increasingly more difficult foes and situations. MWO has none of that (Yes there is FW -- and you can play it with trial mechs! )

Edited by nehebkau, 28 February 2018 - 08:28 AM.

[Spheroid]

@Verillgo: If its the match I am thinking about it serves as the perfect illustration of the lack of skill. Why was the enemy able to take the high ground? The answer is because our team hesitated in its movement. No initiative, no hunger for the kill that would have resulted in better position.

Yes, I was reckless in that Victor, but with an AC-20/SRM6 build I was useless at ranges greater than 250 meters. Having scored a solid airstrike on that cliff my thinking was to clean up the few mechs that may have been at the top of the ramp. It was the correct decision given the limited information at the time. It wasn't an obvious suicide attack either as there was another light or medium with me for part of that ramp probe.

If the mechs were obviously on the highground why was no one spotting? That info would have been useful. My death was not instant I squirelled many times my number before dying. That would have an opportune time to engage them.

Edited by Spheroid, 28 February 2018 - 09:57 AM.

[JediPanther]

Maybe make the game fun or you know do some real balance where 2-3 mechs don't define a single weight class to the point you don't even need to name the mechs just the weight class. Lights.

[Verilligo]

Spheroid, on 28 February 2018 - 09:54 AM, said:

@Verillgo: If its the match I am thinking about it serves as the perfect illustration of the lack of skill. Why was the enemy able to take the high ground? The answer is because our team hesitated in its movement. No initiative, no hunger for the kill that would have resulted in better position.

Yes, I was reckless in that Victor, but with an AC-20/SRM6 build I was useless at ranges greater than 250 meters. Having scored a solid airstrike on that cliff my thinking was to clean up the few mechs that may have been at the top of the ramp. It was the correct decision given the limited information at the time. It wasn't an obvious suicide attack either as there was another light or medium with me for part of that ramp probe.

If the mechs were obviously on the highground why was no one spotting? That info would have been useful. My death was not instant I squirelled many times my number before dying. That would have an opportune time to engage them.

Honestly, the enemy had that position not due to lack of aggression, but because they counter-nascar'd us. We went right to assume a high position, expecting them to move right so we could fire down into them. Instead they went left and took the high ridge that gives them better sight lines on our team than we had on them. Given the team as a whole was slow, the rest had difficulty keeping up with the sudden need to shift tactics and they striked/ranged the team half to death before we could even properly engage. While you did valiantly work to squirrel the enemy and push into them, it was actually a useless endeavor because the terrain blocked all of our attempts to shoot at them. When they did decide to push out of that chokepoint, they did so as a swarm, aided by the fact they'd already torn off half our mechs at range.

Our positioning was just terrible and pushing forward was the exact wrong action to take. What we needed to do was withdraw as soon as we saw them take that ridge and before they started raining artillery and ranged attacks on us. Our team certainly wasn't fast enough and close-ranged enough on the whole to have managed a pushing action. If we had drawn them out of their position and forced them to fight at a less advantageous one at our side, we could have held the line long enough to wrap around with our speedier mechs and heavy-hitting close rangers like your Victor and come at them from both sides, cutting off their ability to retreat. But hindsight is always 20/20, so I ended up dying right alongside you in my MRM60/AC10 Zeus.

Just to say, sometimes it's not the rest of the team that's at fault, but rather our expectations of what they are capable of that are in error. Sometimes you have to rein your own self in to adapt to the reality you're facing, you can't very well make a speedy push if the team is physically incapable of reaching those velocities.

[LordNothing]

i blame it on the fact that this game only has four maps. players are their own worst enemy in this case. the tendency to vote for easy mode maps means that you are going to wind up on one of the 4 maps that usually get voted. the other maps that never get voted are the very variety people ask for. the solution is to weight the vote on the lesser played maps so they get upvoted more.